


you missed my heart

by skywalkwithme



Series: someday we'll linger in the sun [2]
Category: Arthurian Mythology, Le Morte d'Arthur - Thomas Malory, Romans | Arthurian Romances - Chrétien de Troyes
Genre: Character Study, Gen, No Plot, just prose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-28
Updated: 2019-07-28
Packaged: 2020-07-23 22:48:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20016052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skywalkwithme/pseuds/skywalkwithme
Summary: Lancelot is nineteen.Arthur is twenty-eight.Guinevere is twenty-seven.





	you missed my heart

**Author's Note:**

> just word vomit, dunno! im extremely caffeinated and i can't tell if this is good

Lancelot is nineteen. He has softly curling black hair, and light eyes with dark rims around the edges that made them look even paler. The eyes of one of those large white horses. He has the same long face and pinkish nose as these horses, a sort of milky unwholesomeness about him, pallid clear skin and a nose that looks like it might start running, the kind of face that makes you want to give him a hot drink and a sandwich. This is maybe why so many women liked him, as he was constantly in situations where he needed a sandwich, or a blood transfusion. Unfortunately it was the Middle Ages and they could give him neither of these things. Maybe this is why they were constantly trying to have sex with him. To compensate? That’s cruel to those women. However he did almost constantly provoke these sort of nurturing urges, which came out in various displays and elements.  
He was very tall, almost too tall, and his hands are large and red and covered in little white scars, because he spends a lot of his life touching sharp things. He is still growing into his adult body- he grew a lot when he was sixteen, and his flesh had to stretch itself over the long railroad lengths of his new bones. He has broad, right-angled shoulders, round joints and sockets that you can see. There is no line between his mind and his body- his body is his job; to throw it into fights, to batter it at people, to utilize it. He knows how his muscles pull over his shoulders, where his forearm connects with his wrist, the same way men learn Latin. It is a siege weapon, cranked back and released, again and again in one direction.  
He has killed between two and four people. It’s between two and four because two of them he struck with great buffets but then did not actually ever see if they died. Two of them died as he wore them like clothes, their blood and skin. One a bandit and the other a knight, the son of a lord. He cried about this, sitting down, turning his helmet over and over in his hands, asking God to forgive him. This is the thing about the Middle Ages- they were just getting into the territory of killing lots of people from far away (crossbows and longbows had been invented but were still pending approval with the Pope) so mostly when you killed someone they left themselves in your fingernail beds, in your mouth and hair, flecked in your eyes. People also cried more freely, they wept, they held each other and begged God to still let them into heaven, men and women both. Lancelot did a lot of both of these things.

Arthur is twenty-eight. He doesn’t know how many people he had killed; neither do I. There is no way of counting. When he was fifteen he had taken up his sword and coursed through the fields of Badon like a burst dam, his eyes glinting murderous behind the nose guard of his helmet. He had lashed the Saxons back with steel and wood, and his men had combed over the field after, picking their gold clasps and beads off their bodies as the sun went down and it started to drizzle. Three days later he had sat on his throne and his fourteen-year-old wife with a face that revealed nothing had placed a circlet on his head, and everyone had cheered. This was a Saxon ceremony, and he was crowned with Saxon jewels, and took up court near Witancester. Conquerers more than anything else are robbers.  
Arthur loved music, he loved stories, he loved feasts, he loved urging his chestnut gelding faster and faster through the forest after various white harts. He loved his knights like sons, even though most of them were older than him. He loved his wife’s warm body, loved Lancelot’s uncomplicated and undemanding adoration. He would take his horse and put on a red cloak and vestments and go ride among his people. They would reach their hands up to him from their little manorial gardens with chickens walking in and out the front door, and he would love them so much his eyes filled with tears. He would pick up their babies and kiss them, not because he was running for office- he was ordained by God, he didn’t have to run- but because he loved those little babies, their heads pink and unshod like boiled sweets. When he sat his throne, he held his sceptre in one hand and his sword in the other, circlet on his head, beard flowing down his breastplate like bounty out of a cornucopia. He loved to look like these pictures. To be king as everyone imagined he was filled him with satisfaction. He has a voice bigger than England, a voice that booms up to the top of the Orkneys and down to the Isle of Wight- when he spoke all the tapestries fell off the wall all over the palace. Arthur was a young king, and existed practically with a halo behind his head in real life, the kind you saw in paintings, like a golden dinner plate. The meal on the plate is him.

Guinevere is twenty-seven. Her hair is blonde, her eyes are blue, her mouth is pink. She is very small- she has not grown much since her marriage. She has long, delicate hands, the long hands like two ineffectual wings you see in an illuminated manuscript, hands blessing or praying or appealing to God’s mercy. She is beautiful- there is no point recording that, you know this. She brings ale in a jug to the table with two hands, she sits beside Arthur on the dais and reflects back his squarish bright glory, she eats rare and bloodied hinds of harts with her fork and knife, passing them into her mouth carefully so as not to stain her lips. She negotiates the release of captives and sits at the table at treaty negotiations. Jewels are placed at her neck and wrists - she’s a living reliquary. When Arthur walks, she walks behind, her veil sweeping. She is his counterpart, his femininity, his bare left side. Medieval people love this sort of duality. It reminds them of the rightness of things, the great kingdom of God where everyone marched off Noah’s ark two by two.  
Guinevere lives in her own upstairs country. She and him have seperate bedrooms, seperate audience chambers, because this is how things used to be done. She has a large square room, walls clothed in red fabrics, dim and warm, like the inside of a body. There is a large red bed, a fire smoking, other women sitting on the floor. There is a ritual called Enclosure: when women were ready to give birth then, women who did not work, that is, they absented themselves to rooms like these, covered the windows, closed themselves inside as their child slumbers in them, burrowed into the hot and secret workings of themselves. The room smells like rot and wine, the unrestrained proliferation and procreation of plants in wet earth. She exists as a part of those deep colours, the red of her wall, melting inside of them, the globular stones adorning her body sinking her, heavy, down, down, her face disappearing behind the clouded water of her veil. She grows to fill that room, the borders of her body becoming the negative space between bed and hearth. Her eyes never look at you. Women entered these rooms and then they exited, the baby produced, cleaned, and made real, their faces arranged for their husbands. Guinevere has never had children, has never come close. Yet this is where she lives.  
She attends the feast, she lifts the cup, she follows her husband, step-to-step. The court goes a-Maying in the fragrant youthful woods, and she leaves, her sleek yellow head and green kirtle slipping away through the bushes from her entourage. Ten minutes later she is back. She meets with the king and queen of Mercia, Arthur a shape of solid steel and gold next to her, and she begins to weep silently. She pats her eyes on her long fashionable sleeves and says nothing of it. One day she sits with Lancelot, listening to a troubadour, and grips his hand until she cuts off his circulation. She feasts, she pours, she walks. She is a fountain constantly flowing, a fountain vomiting blood.

**Author's Note:**

> He missed my heart, he missed my heart  
> He got me good, I knew he would,  
> But he missed my heart, he missed my heart
> 
> You Missed My Heart, Phoebe Bridgers


End file.
